On Time

I’ve never been particularly good at time management, although my job as Chair of an Art Department at a State-University-you’ve-probably-heard-of demands it. In fact, I’m more managed by time than the other way around. My tendency to over-commit is near pathological. I do, however, have an intimate and nuanced relationship with time that informs and is informed by riding a bicycle. Juggling family, an art career and work with training and racing has required a kind of Faustian bargain: I will keep the lids on these pots by maintaining a level of acceptable mediocrity in each that, from across the room, appears to be soup. Not exactly selling my soul, but allowing big parts of it to be mashed and distorted to accommodate an unforgiving schedule.

Saint Wolfgang and the Devil, by Michael Pacher.

Einstein was as sure of the fact that time doesn’t really exist—at least in the way we tend to wrap our minds around it—as he was of anything. The separation between past/present/future he called a “convincing illusion”. I find this idea more than a little bit comforting, especially because I think the way we tend to treat time as a commodity is so crass and, well, pedestrian. We’re doing the same thing, of course, with that other man-made abstraction: the internets. Although the web is really more like a nervous system—designed (if we can even use that term–I actually prefer “grown”) to route around all efforts to control it—we think we know what it is and what it is for based almost exclusively on how we happen to use it now (namely, for commerce). Smarter people than I have posited crackpot visions of a web that will eventually gain sentiency and let us all know what it really is and what its “special purpose” will be. I think there may be more similarities than differences between the gap that exists between our pragmatic application of the web and its epistemological/ontological nature and the same gap between how we “manage” time and the actual nature of time. But to get back to the point: there are moments when the blurred boundaries between past, present and future that Einstein described come into sharp focus. Sex is one of them. So, I’m told, is meditation. Happens for me every now and then during final relaxation in yoga. A profound encounter with a work of art does it for some. Psychoactive drugs do it for others. Also happens during sleep. My youngest daughter asked me the other night, “Dad, why can’t we feel time passing when we sleep?” And further, “if we can’t feel it, how do we know it is real?” She was not satisfied with the fact that I thought these were really good questions that some super smart people have also grappled with and that she may in fact be, by proxy, a super-genius. She could easily see that this was just my academic way of admitting I have no idea. And I suppose it could be the case that any peripatetic endurance activity might set the stage for philosophizing, but for me the only other time it really sinks in that our conventional notion of time is but an contrivance (and it happens almost every day) is when I’m on a bicycle, and particularly when I’m going really fast.

I can’t really afford the time it takes to train my body for racing, yet I’ve somehow logged upwards of 250 hours and more than 4000 miles on the bike (not counting races) since March. In truth, I don’t really have time to post on this blog, but here I am posting. I barter for time on my iPhone as if it were stock–I can’t even relate to that guy I used to be who kept a paper calendar. How did that even work? I’ve awakened at the crack of dawn to drive half-way across the state in a sleepy stupor to arrive at a race too late to get in a warm-up lap (turns out it is possible, contrary to common sense, to clip in and start a cyclocross race with both arms behind your back, trapped in the jacket you’re frantically trying to shed so your number can be seen by the officials). I’ve gone to dinner parties on a Saturday night with clandestine, encrusted mud and blood on my legs under my jeans because I didn’t leave time for a shower. I also routinely disappear for what seems to me mere minutes but by everyone else’s estimation are hours on end to my studio, ostensibly working (read: staring into space). And then there’s the ever-present tyranny of time within the space of a race. A road race can take hours in which time seems to slow to a crawl and ultimately, often, comes down to an explosive sprint that separates racers by seconds (or fractions thereof). In these moments, one’s relationship to time is anything but abstract–it becomes visceral: past, present, future are all one. More accurately, time sort of evaporates and there’s just your body hurtling through space—from past through present to future—at one with all three simultaneously and simultaneously none of the above. But it is a race, which presupposes a very concrete connection to the clock. And in the end, on BikeReg, you are assigned a time that establishes your “place” within that hierarchy of your peers and you’re back squarely in the land of clocks; where time is measured, managed, governed. Maybe Einstein is right and it is always this amorphous and malleable, but I actually feel it, palpably, in those moments. Much like the reminder one gets that the Earth is a sphere when witnessing its curvature from a plane: oh yeah—I am here. Now.

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“Someone once told me that ‘time’ is a predator that stalks us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment because it will never come again.”
- Jean-Luc Picard (Star Trek Generations)